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All Girls Together
- taking a look at the relationships between sisters in your family history
For many young women in the past, relationships with sisters
were probably the longest-lasting connections of their lives – vastly
outspanning their relationships with their parents and their own children. If
you discover branches heavy with sisters on your family tree, consider
carefully the age gaps between them, when and whom they married, where they
ended up living, whether or not they had children and the ways in which their
lives may have consequently merged and diverged. The chances are that the
relationships between them – whether they were nurturing or hostile (and they
were probably at different times both) - were one of the central features of
their experience.
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| Adult sisters abroad c 1910. Author's own collection |
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Most of what we know about relationships between sisters in
the past focuses on middle- and upper-class girls. It has been suggested that
close emotional bonds between sisters really developed only in the late
eighteenth century. Before this sibling relationships in general were less
affectionate. This was partly due to the high instance of childhood mortality
(something which meant that families invested less emotionally in each child),
and partly due to the rivalry and conflict that could occur between siblings
over inheritance practices and marriage customs. In the late eighteenth
century, it has been argued, sisters became closer and less competitive than
they had been in earlier ages. Whilst brothers were away from home at private
schools or in military regiments, girls stayed at home until marriage and were,
therefore, thrown upon each other’s company for more lengthy periods.
In the nineteenth-century, bonds of affection between
sisters grew ever deeper. There was a new emphasis on the role of love in
family life and parents emphasised the need for harmony and co-operation
between their children. The existence of large families often meant that
younger girls were partly parented by older sisters. Where girls were educated
at home, the role of the elder girls could be that of teacher to her younger
female siblings. Evidence of sisterly relationships in the Victorian period
comes through personal paperwork such as letters and diaries. From these it is
apparent that, on many occasions, the close bonds of sisterhood helped women to
overcome emotional and financial difficulties and stimulated creativity -
anything from shared needlework projects to clutches of novels all produced
within the same family home.
In the twentieth century, families tended to be smaller with
the result (according to some psychologists), that children competed more for
maternal affection. There was an increase in sibling rivalry and jealousy
particularly amongst young children. As the century progressed, there was a
focus on the individuality rather than the similarity of siblings (separate
beds and bedrooms for each child, for example) and, with the advent of sexual
equality with brothers, sisterhood was no longer quite the intense domestic
experience it had once been.
Sisters and Marriage
You should pay particular attention to the dates of marriage
amongst groups of sisters on your family tree. Whatever their relationship as
children, the testing time for sisters came when they were old enough to be
betrothed. Victorian letters and diaries reveal that sisters often experienced
deep pain when they were separated from each other, even by pleasant events
such as courtship and marriage. From the wedding day onwards, the lives of
sisters (which had previously been almost interchangeable) could become widely
divergent depending on the wealth, background and character of the prospective
husbands.
It was important in families of good social standing for
girls to get married in order of age and to marry men with similar social
aspirations. The five daughters of Mrs Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice (pub. 1813) are a
constant worry to their mother since all of them are ‘out’ (i.e. old enough to
appear in public at balls and dances) and not one of them is married, but it is
Jane, the eldest, whom she seeks to marry off first. The situation of a younger
sister marrying before an older one was considered embarrassing and something
to be avoided; a married woman automatically attained seniority over her older
unmarried sisters.
For many other nineteenth-century sets of sisters, marriage
at any point was not in the picture. The Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and
Anne, were in fact three of five daughters (the eldest two Maria and Elizabeth
having died as children). Such were the close bonds between the sisters that
none married during the lifetime of the others. When Charlotte finally tied the
knot in 1854, it was after the death of her two sisters. She herself passed
away soon afterwards from pneumonia whilst pregnant.
By 1850, there was a popularly perceived ‘surplus of women’
in the population – partly due to the fact that the mortality rate for boys was
higher than that for girls, partly because more men worked abroad in the armed
forced or had emigrated. By 1861
there were 10,380,285 women living in England and Wales but only 9,825,246 men.
This meant that marriage for some women was unlikely. Unmarried middle-class
sisters often lived together to minimise expenses and were often supported by
small annuities bequeathed from their parents’ estates or by working brothers.
In other cases, sisters who married well could become the
centre of important cultural networks. Sisters Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and
Louisa Macdonald, (four of the seven) daughters of a lower middle-class
Methodist Minister leapt from obscurity when they got hitched. Georgiana and
Agnes married the famous painters Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter
(President of Royal Academy) respectively, whilst Alice became the mother of
the future Poet Laureate, Rudyard Kipling and Louisa, the mother of future
Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin.
In these close-knit family circles of Victorian and
Edwardian Britain, it seems reasonable to suppose that had one of your female
ancestors died, her husband might have considered marrying one of her unmarried
sisters – another blossom from the same tree, as it were. But the practice of
marrying a deceased wife’s sister was actually forbidden by law until
1907. This is because those who were
already connected by marriage were considered to be related to each other (by
so-called ‘affinity’) in a way that made it improper for them to marry. Between
the Marriage Act of 1835 and The Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act of 1907,
a man wishing to marry his deceased wife’s sister was treated as if he were
considering incest! During that period, the only men able to marry their
deceased wives sisters were wealthy ones who could afford to do so abroad such
as the painters William Holman Hunt and John Collier.
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| Symes sisters, Phyllis, Emmie, and Jenny, c. 1908, Hull. After the death of their father and two younger
sisters and before their own marriages, my great aunts (sisters Emmie, Phyllis
and Jenny Symes) took on financial responsibility for their mother and younger
brother, Jack. An example of ordinary sisters working together for a common
goal, all the girls worked for Marks and Spencer (then a newly emergent
company) first as shop assistants and then as manageresses. Their work took
them across the North of England from Manchester to Hull, York and Birmingham. |
Sisters and the Camera
Sisters can often be identified in Victorian and Edwardian photographs by their matching outfits. There was a particular craze for dressing daughters alike in the mid Victorian period (c 1855-1885), particularly among the upper and middle classes who aped the daughters of Queen Victoria in this respect. Even sisters who were far apart in age would be portrayed in matching garb and young adults as well as small children also followed this trend. The matching could extend to hats, boots, jewellery and even to the mirror-like poses of the sitters. Sometimes sisters would differentiate themselves from each other by a minor detail of dress such as a corsage worn on one side of the bodice or the other, or extra trimming.
The relative ages of sisters in photographs can be deduced by the length of the dresses they wore – with the hemlines of older girls being longer. Another clue to the age of a girl is the styling of her hair, with younger sisters wearing their locks down (loose or in ringlets) whilst their elder sisters wore it up. Whilst the fashion for matching dress predominated amongst the rich, working-class sisters were also sometimes portrayed in identical ‘Sunday Best’ outfits.
When interviewing family members about their memories of groups of sisters in the past, be careful. Girls are characteristically remembered by reference to their looks, (for example, ‘the beauty’, or ‘the Plain Jane’); or their marital status and propensity for producing children, (‘the spinster’, ‘the mother of ten’). Other descriptions may be equally distorting; Queen Victoria’s five daughters have recently been described as ‘vivacious, intelligent Vicky; sensitive, altruistic Alice; dutiful, dull Lenchen; artistic, rebellious Louise; and shy baby sister Beatrice.’ This over-simplistic labelling and differentiating of sisters won’t necessarily help you to understand what your female ancestors were really like.
|
In the twentieth century, the public continued to be
enthralled by many other sets of sisters. The Pankhurst sorority, Sylvia,
Christabel and Adela, derived energy from their sisterly bonds in their
struggle to secure the vote for women, whilst sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia
Woolf (said to have been sexually abused by their two older half-brothers)
produced unusual and startling works of art and literature. Meanwhile, the complex
political situation of the mid-twentieth century is often described through the
antics of one of the oddest of all groups of upper-class sisters – the six
Mitford girls – who ranged in sympathy from Fascist Diana to Communist Jessica.
How exactly our own great-grandmothers interacted with their
sisters depends, of course, on many factors - on the size of their families,
for instance, on the age spacing and birth order of the children, on the class,
ethnic and cultural traditions of their family as well as on their individual
personalities. But whether characterised by harmony or tension, there is no
doubt that sisterhood was an important relationship between the women in our
family trees and one that deserves our special attention.
This article first appeared in Family Tree Magazine UK 2010
https://www.family-tree.co.uk/
Click here for more on books by Ruth A. Symes (UK)
Useful Websites
Useful Books
Flanders, Judith. A Circle of
Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa
Baldwin. Penguin 2002
Fletcher, Sheila, Victorian
Girls: Lord Lyttelton’s Daughters,
Phoenix, 2004
Mintz, Steven. 1983.
A Prison of Expectations: The Family
in Victorian Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Pols, Robert.
Dating Nineteenth-Century Photographs,
Federation of Family History Societies, 2005
Symes, Ruth,
Family First: Tracing Relationships in the Past, Pen and Sword, 2013
Click here to see more details about this book
Beautifully illustrated family history books with a difference by a frequent contributor to the UK family history press. I write for Family Tree Magazine UK ( https://www.family-tree.co.uk/); Discover Your Ancestors Online Periodical and Bookazine (http://www.discoveryourancestors.co.uk/); Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine (http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/). The publishers of my family history books are Pen and Sword Books (http://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/) and The History Press (http://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/).
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